Saturday, April 25, 2009

Friday, April 24, 2009

By now even Zaire must be rapt over Susan Boyle, the 47-year-old Scottish matron who'd never been kissed until the day she tramped into view of a huge Britain's Got Talent audience and made out big time, stunning the judges and making many automatically cynical assholes in the audience rethink their positions on what it might take to be a star. In her appropriately-chosen I Had a Dream from Les Mis, the vibrato may have been a little uncertain but otherwise it was like asking a man in the street to do a quadruple axel and then seeing it pulled off almost flawlessly.

Suddenly the world had a new idol. It may be true, as a friend said, that the world's tears were explainable to "reverse sexism." Mega-offers poured in almost instantaneously, and just as surely, the grooming sharks sensed something in the water, something that could surely spell the end for Susan Boyle, if she acted on it.

Let's hope Susan hangs onto the unibrow, the dumpy if decent style of dress, the touching humility about herself. Isn't the usual stardom glamour routine a little boring by now? A little done? Remember, she's almost 48. It was the argument that naked talent needs. — Lloyd Dykk

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

The work by Emmanuelle Renard is very modern but in temperament, classically Greek and strikingly beautiful. Her show, at Alliance Francaise until April 20, is called Erosions, and quite fittingly. There is something undeniably erosive about it, cutting as it does through time as well as all the cliches about abstraction.It can leave you mysteriously in tears from its Attic potency, which is yet a potency resolved in calm. For some reason I thought of Gabriel Fauré, probably the most elegant of French composers and one who sums up the maxim of calme, luxe et volupté. Another name that might come to your head is Jean Dubuffet, though this work is unique. Renard is, incidentally, French, and now lives in Vancouver.Even pulled up from her website, on a medium notorious for flattening images and reducing their tactical detail (another erosion), Renard's work is stunning. But this view is only an approximation of what it is to see it live.A brief statement about her work on the website has two particularly apt words. One is Ovid, and the sometimes bipartite images do suggest elegiac couplets. The other word is "paroxysmic", which could help explain the urge for your eyes to well up with purely aesthetic emotion. Only look at Vache. It could come from a paleolithic cave wall at Lascaux, or it could be an image from Greek myth. Yet it has a perfect bovine quiddity.The work, with its palette of mostly organic colours which are restrained, yet exquisite, is a testament to quiet resolved passion. There is a feeling of sadness here but it is well submerged, perhaps sublimated. As the Arab proverb says, "Sad are only those who understand."— Lloyd Dykk

The motif here is Greater Vancouver in transition. With many exceptions.

Unless otherwise noted, most of the stuff here was created by Bernie Lyon, a Vancouver illustrator, and Lee Bacchus, a Vancouver photographer/writer. Our work has appeared in The Tyee, Vancouver Magazine and Western Living among others.Contact rlbacchus@gmail.com